


Sing Out Loud

by ninemoons42



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Canon Disabled Character, Childhood Friends, F/M, First Meetings, Gen, Hong Kong, Male-Female Friendship, Musicians, Tumblr: jaegercon, meet cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 15:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In another time and place, Mako and Hermann grew up next door to each other until he went to university and never left it, and until she became the frontwoman of a monstrously popular rock band. They've remained friends since.</p><p>Now Mako wants Hermann to come to one of her concerts, but she's got to take his condition into consideration - enter her boyfriend Raleigh and his friend, Newt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sing Out Loud

**Author's Note:**

> Written in celebration of [Jaegercon 2013](http://jaegercon.tumblr.com).
> 
> Thanks to **Afrocurl** for looking this one over.

The soothing scratch of chalk against painted wood is suddenly interrupted by an outburst of music: it sounds like a choir of voices and a mass of electric guitars dueling, and Hermann Gottlieb actually very nearly drops everything in his hands when he recognizes the song and its source.

It’s never easy to hasten up and down steps and for once he curses the fact that he puts his briefcase and his oversized jacket in the first row of seats; he throws the stub of chalk in his hand in the general direction of the black box on his desk and hurriedly flaps dust off his hand as he finally lunges for his mobile phone and hits Answer.

“Hermann? Did you actually pick up? _O-hisashiburi_ [1],” says the voice on the other end, familiar and sweet like its owner is still singing, even though he knows for a fact that Mako Mori is nowhere near a stage or a recording studio or anything that looks like a microphone right now. “I’m glad I managed to catch you,” she continues. “I’m at an airport, you see, and they’ll be calling our flight any moment now. I thought I’d have to leave you a voicemail message again.”

“I’ve a free day,” Hermann says, “or at least I’m not teaching this morning, which is a rare thing, and I will be spending my hours doing something productive. I might be approaching a breakthrough of sorts. Hello, Mako,” he adds as he half-falls into the nearest chair. “Where are you off to?”

“San Francisco,” she says. “Did you forget we’re going on tour?”

Hermann stops and thinks, and smiles. “I didn’t forget that you were going to start in a week’s time.”

“But you did forget where we were starting,” she says, teasing. “Well, consider this your reminder. From San Fran to Manila to Sydney, and after that I have no idea - Herc has the itinerary, not me.”

“I really do want to come to one of your concerts, Mako - ”

“Good!” she laughs. “Because I think I can get you tickets for one of the later shows.” 

There’s a squelch on the line, not that loud, but it is still startling enough that Hermann winces and holds the phone away from his ear. Faintly he can hear his friend conferring with someone, and faintly he can hear laughter, and for a moment, he misses her so much that it hurts. It’s not exactly the same kind of physical hurt that he lives with on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t really compare to the grinding of his bones and the straining of his muscles and nerves - but it’s pain, and it’s real to him.

Some days he looks up from his end of the table in the teachers’ lounge to find that he is eating by himself again, with everyone else clustered together in conversation and not a word directed at him, and he wishes he could look to his left side and see Mako immersed in her novel du jour, or drawing patterns in her coffee, too much creamer and too much sugar. Sometimes he finds himself writing _Dear Mako_ on his smartphone and then deleting the message because he’s not sure what else he can say, other than _I miss you_.

He still remembers being gangly and ten and looking up from a swing set, from the mathematics textbook he’d checked out from the library, into the eyes of a solemn-looking girl just a year or two younger than he was, who was dressed in both some kind of pretty robe with stripes and flowers and a blue coat that was a lot like the one his mother wore. He remembers her asking him to push her on the swing, and he remembers her laughing, such a huge sound for one so small, as she hit the highest point of her arc.

“Hermann? Hermann, please be there,” says the voice in his ear, and he blinks and shakes himself and he’s back in the present. He’s back in the lecture room that will not be seeing any students or hearing any discussions for another three hours at least, with the grit of chalk still clinging to the head of his walking stick.

He’s alone, and Mako is calling him, and he says, softly, “I’d really like to see you. It’s really been a while.”

“Yes, it has been,” is her equally quiet response. “So I will be very, very angry with you if you don’t use the tickets I’ll be sending you. I know you’re in the middle of the term, but I also know that you’re not really using the time off you’re being given. Hong Kong, three weeks, be there,” she says. “I have to go soon. They’re calling our flight.”

“I’ll see you in three weeks,” Hermann says as he levers himself up to a standing position. He’s smiling, though she’s nowhere in sight, and though the idea of the next twenty-one days seems to drag at him, pull down at his shuffling feet. “I’ll be there, Mako, I promise.”

“TalktoyousoonbyeHermann _matadene_ [2],” she says, all in a rush, and woven into her words is a voice reading out a series of letters and numbers and _San Francisco International Airport_.

Hermann moves back in the direction of the chalkboards, checking the proof that is in progress, and he erases one of the variables and rewrites it so that it’s a little more legible, and then he picks up his things and starts bracing himself for the long walk across the grounds to the professors’ offices.

As he maneuvers up and down the curbs he drafts his request for ten days’ leave, and it is something entirely new to him, just as the idea of pushing a little girl on a swing had been - and it makes him smile, and try to remember something Mako’s performed on stage, so he can hum it to himself and think about her walking by his side.

*

Mako stretches her feet and uses her hands to work at the tendons and the meat of her heel, and Raleigh Becket brushes her hair back from her face and smiles when she leans briefly into his touch.

The muted sunlight coming in through the tinted window catches the blue streaks in her hair in soft flares.

“You’re smiling like you’re thinking of home,” he says, fond and soft, when she finally loops her battered travel pillow around her neck. “You think you managed to convince him?”

She shrugs, and he is the only one who can hear it when she sighs, because she covers her face with both hands. “Hermann is - well, would it surprise you to know that he’s not really that good with people?”

“Which makes me ask,” Raleigh says, “how he can do the whole lecturing students thing, if he’s not comfortable in a crowd.”

“He says the students don’t really count as people to him.”

He nearly does laugh at that. “I can actually see that making sense. They’re a herd, one single moving thing, right? Easier to focus on the shared movements than on the individuals.”

“Yes, and besides, he’d rather look at the numbers than at them.”

“Okay,” Raleigh says. “So he’ll need help. We’re a little bit popular these days.”

Mako shakes her head. “That’s not even an understatement. I’m kind of worried about going out on stage and seeing all those people.”

He puts his arm around her shoulders, kneads carefully at the muscles in her upper arm. “You’re the toughest of us all,” he says. “You’ve never backed down from anything. We look up to you, you know.”

“If looking up also means looking down at the exact same time,” Hercules Hansen says as he walks down the aisle.

Raleigh makes a face at him, and Mako sticks out her tongue, and all Herc mutters is “Cute, you two, cute,” which makes her laugh softly.

“Stop teasing them unless you want your hotel room candy-bombed. _Again_ ,” Yancy Becket says as he shifts his backpack from shoulder to shoulder. “And this time I’ll even help them.”

“You gave them the room keys last time,” Herc grouses. “How is that not helping?”

When Raleigh cranes around to look at the others, Yancy grins and gives him a thumbs-up with one hand, while fishing in his jacket for his e-book reader with the other.

“Thanks for being such an awesome brother-in-law, Yancy,” Mako sing-songs.

“Technically that’s not true, but hey, I don’t care what you call me. And no problem,” Yancy says.

It’s a joke, and an old one, but it still makes Raleigh grin and kiss Mako on the cheek.

The four of them settle down at last when the flight attendants appear at the end of the aisle to begin demonstrating safety procedures.

They’re halfway across the country when Mako says, entirely out of nowhere, “I’m not entirely sure we should assign Hermann an escort of some kind. He might not take it well.”

“He gets touchy about his condition?” Raleigh mutters, mostly sympathetic. 

She winces, briefly there and gone. “You could say that.”

“Maybe you should walk me through it, so I can understand it better.”

“ _Hai_ ,” she says, and she bows her head for a moment, and Raleigh kisses the top of her head.

“I met Hermann when I was ten years old. He was the only other kid on the block who was my age,” Mako begins. “I didn’t see him that frequently at school; I guess he was taking other classes because he’d tested out or something. Sometimes we’d see each other on the street, but he was always walking to the library, and I wasn’t much interested in books then. I had my dolls, I had my classmates, I had Stacker, and that was it for me.

“But Stacker sometimes had to go away on business trips and I guess he asked Mrs Gottlieb to look in on me, or she made Hermann socialize, or something.” Mako smiles a faint distant smile. “Even at the playground he was always just - reading. He was quiet and he stayed out of the other kids’ way, like I did, because I was smaller than almost everyone else.”

When she tells him the story about Hermann pushing her on the swing Raleigh says, “I can see why you’re friends.”

Mako sighs. “Don’t make fun.”

“I’m not, seriously. You want to be taken seriously. And I remember you mentioning that he takes everything very seriously. I mean, it makes sense, he wouldn’t be a top scientist-teacher-somethingorother if he didn’t. But the thing is, he didn’t laugh at you even when you asked him to push you on a swing.”

“I - yes, I suppose so. And I learned to take him very seriously, all the way up to the time he got injured.” She makes a face and for a moment Raleigh can see an old pain in her eyes. “I was right there when it happened, you know - I screamed for Stacker, made him call 911, and I cried until the ambulance got there. Hermann wouldn’t let go of my hand, so I had to go to the hospital with him.”

“That was very brave of you,” Raleigh says. “You’ve never liked hospitals.”

“Hermann’s part of the reason why, yes,” Mako agrees. “And then Stacker. But things were worse for Hermann, because he should have gotten better but he never completely did. He kept having bad reactions to the painkillers, kept wanting to walk despite the pain. His leg was never really the same after. So he had to use a walking stick and I had to stay with him, because people kept wanting to mess with him and I wouldn’t let him go around unprotected.

“That was why we would have these terrible arguments; he thought I pitied him, didn’t want to believe me when I said I looked up to him because he wasn’t going to let something as minor as a life-long limp get between him and his dreams.”

“But you convinced him.”

“Because, like you said, he takes me seriously, and he did it even when he thought that the two of us were working at cross-purposes.” 

She tells him other stories: she tells him about Hermann showing up at one of her voice classes completely unexpected and completely attentive, about the two of them exchanging books, about her making tapes for him to listen to when he went away to college a year before everyone else in their class did. Eventually she turns her face into Raleigh’s shoulder and falls asleep. 

He holds her hand and thinks about helping her friend, and he drafts a text message to someone on his speed-dial list, to be sent when they land.

*

The first thing Hermann thinks when he deplanes at Chek Lap Kok is that he wants to turn around and get home. The traveling has thoroughly scrambled his body clock and he doesn’t know what to make of the smell of the rain and of the sea that comes in when he finally makes it out of the arrivals area, improbably large and lit up. He’s used to the idea of people talking all around him, but the different Chinese cadences throw him off his stride, and it’s with a certain sense of relief that he locates the taxis.

“Where to?” the driver asks after stowing Hermann’s baggage away.

Instead of answering, he shows the driver his phone, opened to Mako’s most recent email. “Do you know where this hotel is?” he asks, completely at sea.

The driver nods and touches the brim of his cap, and sets off through the noise of the Hong Kong night. 

They run into minor traffic jams several times along the way, but Hermann is distracted by the rush of people on the streets, to and fro without stopping for anyone or anything in their way. 

He’s almost glad that he took the cab, because he’s never been a fan of elbows in his back, or up and down his ribs, or anywhere really.

The hotel room is quiet and a little larger than he’s used to; the windows more than make up for it, though. The harbor glitters below him, lights on the dark waves.

The bed behind him is large and, after the long flight, more than inviting, but he leans more heavily on his cane and thinks about the first time he’d ever heard Mako’s voice rising in song: she’d been rough and untrained and she’d been unsteady on one of the higher notes, but he remembers nearly dropping the books he’d been bringing to her when he found her with her head sticking out of the window of his parents’ bedroom, singing to the bright flash of blue that she’d spotted in the branches of a nearby tree.

That first song, that had nothing to do with children’s rhymes or popular music, stays with him through the hours of jet lag - and it is soon overtaken by the other songs, the rest of their first album and on through the others, which he’s loaded onto his phone to listen to.

When he ventures out onto the streets on the third morning the first cab he hails is playing the radio so loudly that he almost has to wince - but as soon as he figures out that the voices belong to Into the Drift, to Mako and to her friends, he taps the driver on the shoulder and encourages him to turn the music all the way up.

He even sings along, silently, when Mako begins to belt out the chorus to “Die Fighting”, and he’s still nodding his head to the beat long after crossing Victoria Harbor.

He walks carefully through the gates to Hong Kong Park, and he watches everyone passing by to make sure that he doesn’t get in anyone’s way; he gets stopped, once, but it’s with a tug on his trouser leg, and when he looks around he has to smile. The little boy has dark hair and rosy cheeks and a wonderfully toothless smile, and when he offers up the tiny white flower in his round fist Hermann smiles and accepts it, grateful.

It’s nothing at all like the flowers Mako wears when she’s in concert, of course. Hermann collects photos of her when she’s performing, and has an alert out for new videos of the band, and it’s gotten to a point where he can identify a photograph of his friend at a concert just by looking at her hair accessories.

It makes him hope she’ll wear something outstanding to the concert in three days’ time, the better for him to remember the experience.

On his way back to the hotel from a long lunch capped off with two pots of fine green tea, he makes the taxi stop at a corner and is almost too distracted to pay his fare, because he’s too busy staring at a wall that is plastered with posters of Mako in a black dress, a wireless mic in her hand and a gigantic orange flower made of fabric scraps and ribbon in her hair.

He’s not the only one staring, either; there’s a small cluster of boys and girls in school uniforms an arm’s length away, and they’re all speaking over each other, admiring the woman on the posters and talking about how it’ll be the first time that Into the Drift will be playing in Hong Kong. 

The excited buzz in their voices makes Hermann smile, though he still has to walk a slow and wide berth around them.

*

“This is...a really, really big place,” Yancy mutters, and Mako follows him into the venue and has to stop dead, because he’d been speaking at his normal volume but she can hear his words whispering around them, the echoes rolling towards them, like someone’s tapping a light but insistent and constant rhythm on the drum of her heart.

Herc walks calmly to center stage, weaves past the technicians and the men and women with the oversized tackle boxes and power tools, and takes a deep breath - and that’s all the warning any of them get, and Mako squeals and claps her hands over her ears when he yells at the empty arena: “ _Hello Hong Kong!_ ”

“Do you have to do that every single time?” Raleigh says, with his hands still covering his ears.

Mako just shakes her head and aims a pulled punch at their drummer’s shoulder. “If I hear those echoes on the day of the concert I’ll - ”

“ - sing over them,” he says just as she does, and she sticks her tongue out at him and turns away to watch as the stagehands continue to work.

Raleigh is walking around somewhere in one of the audience sections, though the seats themselves have not yet been laid out; when he stops, he’s nearly right smack in the middle of the audience section immediately behind the mosh pit.

She watches him look at the stage and then back at his feet a couple of times, and then he shakes his head and ambles back in their direction.

“Special guest?” Herc asks as he tosses his lighter from hand to hand.

“Not mine, hers,” Raleigh says.

Mako blinks, and looks back at the spot where he was just standing. “You’re thinking about Hermann?”

“Yeah. You sure you wanna put him there? If things get messy, he’ll be shoved right into the crush. Not sure you’d want him to be in there.”

She thinks about it. “I don’t really know if he’ll want to dance, but if he wants to, I’m really not going to stand in his way.”

Raleigh stops, and then nods. “Okay, fair point. But you’d probably still feel better if you could get him out of harm’s way quickly, I don’t have to guess.”

“No, you don’t.”

He goes to her then, and when he sits down on the floor, right in front of her feet, she brackets him in between her legs, her ankles snug against his thighs.

That gets them a mocking groan from Yancy: “I really don’t need to see you right on top of my brother like that, Mako,” he says, laughing.

“Turn around,” Raleigh offers, and doesn’t budge, except to flip him off.

“Close your eyes,” Mako says, and puts one hand on Raleigh’s shoulder. More quietly, she adds, “You have something in mind.”

“I’m calling in a favor, yeah,” and she leans in when he shows her his mobile phone, and the message he’s sent: 

_Newt: in exchange for a free ticket to the gig you are going to be doing something for me. You’re going to be watching out for a friend of Mako’s._

She has to cover a snort when she reads the reply:

_I am so there. [And yes, I know you’re doing this for revenge, well played sir well played. P. S. does this mean I finally get to see you kiss Mako on stage?]_

“I hope you said no to that last part,” she says, lightly kicking Raleigh in the butt.

“As if anyone could stop me trying to do it,” Raleigh says, and as if to demonstrate he pulls her hand down and plants a resounding kiss in her palm.

The gesture is quick and sloppy, and it makes her toes curl in her shoes.

When she’s back to herself she looks around the arena, tries to see it all rigged up for their concert. She wants to see the stage, left mostly bare as per their usual instructions, and she wants to dance and jump around with the others, wants to see if the Hong Kong audience can persuade Herc from behind his drums to do a front flip.

And she thinks about the tickets and hotel accommodations for Hermann and she thinks about seeing him here in this audience, and she’s torn right down the middle, because she worries for him - it’s nearly a reflex action for her by now - and she’s also excited.

She wants her friend to be here.

*

The email that blinks up at him on the morning of the concert is short and to the point:

_The venue gets cold, so bring a jacket._

Hermann chuckles to himself, quietly, and warms his hands with another cup of green tea. He had very nearly not packed the parka, but it had been invaluable on the way over, and now he’s glad to have it, though he worries that it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of what he’s wearing to the show.

Then again, he never knows how to get dressed. If it hadn’t been for Mako’s innate good taste he’d have worn entirely the wrong suit to the one party they’d gone to together, somewhere in the depths of middle school. He still smiles at the memory of it, of himself in a neat black suit and a crazy-colored bow tie, blue and green and gold like the feathers of a peacock; and she’d showed up on his doorstep in white lace and ripped-up stockings and a blue rose the size of her fist, pinned precariously into her short hair.

The one photograph in his office at the university is of the two of them in those outfits. Laughing at each other, laughing together, lit up, arms around each other’s shoulders.

He’d been leaning on her during the portrait session and he hadn’t thought to be self-conscious.

Now he brushes down the lapels on a battered suit jacket, and tugs on the hems of his sweater vest. Thin stripes that sort of clash with the grid printed onto his dress shirt, but he thinks that she’d want him to dress this way. Dark trousers, worn boots - his only real concession to the fact that he’ll be walking and standing in a crowd full of strangers - and over all of that, his oversized green parka, tough and fraying somewhat at the hems but still comfortable and warm.

There is, of course, a traffic jam leading to the venue, built like an isosceles trapezium with the longer base serving as the roof - he can’t help but take a photo of it, because he’s never seen anything like it before. The corners and the sloping walls that reach toward the Hong Kong night are illuminated in the colors of Into the Drift: blue, which makes him think of Mako. Blue and blinding white and green, and here and there splashes of red, vibrant against the skyline full of blinking light and movement.

His driver sighs and slumps over and says, after a moment, “You might want to walk, sir - we’ll get nowhere fast in the traffic, now we’re this close.”

Hermann bites at the inside of his cheek to stifle his groan, and consults his ticket. “How far to the coliseum?”

A shrug. “Five hundred meters, less?”

“Thank you.” He hands over the exact fare and once his boots hit the pavement he takes a long, bracing breath. The breeze is rough with salt but pleasantly cooling; he can’t complain, not when it seems to be blowing him straight towards his destination, straight towards his friend.

People stream past him and walk with him - excited men and women, some of them wearing Into the Drift shirts and buttons. He laughs when he passes a woman selling glow sticks, and pays for one in the shape of a six-petaled flower, which he tucks into a pocket.

“Hey mister!”

Hermann freezes on the sidewalk, half-raises his walking stick to a parry position - but there’s no one coming for him except for the man in the crumpled button-down and the hair that sticks out in every direction he can count and probably several that don’t exist.

He looks behind him. There is no one there, so he tries to stand up straight and look dignified. “Are you speaking to me?”

The crumpled and rumpled man nods and smiles at him, and there are lines crinkling up at the corners of his eyes though he’s not actually showing any of his teeth. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you. I was given a description of you,” he says. “You’re with the band, so you get to skip all this lining up thing, you get to go right into the house. Oh and snackies, too, if you want them. You wanna follow me.”

Hermann thinks of Mako, and has to hold back his pleased little smile. “Thank you,” he says. “Please lead on.”

“Wrong verb, plus my name’s not Macduff,” the man says as he shrugs and turns hard on his heel. 

Other than appreciating the allusion to the Scottish play, Hermann can’t help but stare at the broad expanse of the other man’s shoulders, the end of his battered tie as it flips and flaps in the constant breeze - and he’s also caught staring at the other man’s sneakers. There are holes in the otherworldly green of the canvas, the soles are almost hopelessly caked with dirt, and the ends of the shoelaces are unraveling.

Just inside the gates everyone is staring at the people sitting on and around a respectable-looking boat of a desk that wouldn’t have been out of place in any one of the classrooms that Hermann often teaches in, because the woman leaning on one corner is dressed in something that looks like it’s been taken out of an 18th-century painted portrait. The buttons from throat to hem shine brightly silver in the overhead lights, and the rich dove-gray of the coat itself contrasts very strongly with her short black hair with the dark blue ends, and the flower she’s wearing in it, a mass of petals in neon orange and yellow.

The three men surrounding her are dressed much, much more plainly: black shirts and black trousers, suspenders in the same gray as her coat.

The man who’s been leading Hermann fakes a fit of loud and obnoxious coughing, and Hermann starts to laugh when the woman looks in their direction - and then springs off the desk, dashing straight for him.

“Mako,” he whispers, again and again into her hair when she’s got him in her strong and slender arms. “Mako, I’m here.”

“You made it!” When Mako pulls away she’s blinking away tears, bright on her eyelashes. “You’re here!”

In her wake comes the tallest of the three men. The material of his shirt is straining to contain the bulk of his broad shoulders.

Hermann’s expecting a big voice to go with the seemingly oversized frame. He doesn’t get it. “Hello,” the man murmurs, low and friendly. “I’m Raleigh Becket. I guess you could say I’m kind of with Mako?”

“Pleased to meet you at last,” Hermann says, taking the offered hand. “Hermann Gottlieb.”

“I know. I’ve heard so much about you.”

Mako tucks herself under Hermann’s arm, and reaches up to plant a kiss on his cheek, and Raleigh only laughs softly, encouragingly. “And those are Yancy and Herc.”

Hermann waves to them, and they nod and shrug, respectively.

“Hey, isn’t anyone going to, like, introduce us properly?”

Hermann blinks when he realizes that it’s the man in the battered sneakers who’s spoken; he’s apparently talking in time to the punches he’s aiming at Raleigh’s shoulder. “I mean, there is such a thing as being rude, right, you can’t just expect me and him to like have a conversation without ever referring to each other by name - ”

“You did that,” is Raleigh’s reply. “You still do.”

The man in the battered sneakers pulls a pair of equally hard-used eyeglasses from a pocket and jams them onto the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, whatever, so? I still bothered to learn your name, man, I still use it from time to time - I call the whole lot of you by your names, don’t I?”

“Usually when you’re complaining about being hungry or bored,” Mako interjects dryly. “In the most obnoxious way.”

“We post a big sign on the door that says REHEARSALS KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU NEWT for that exact reason, don’t you know how to read?” Raleigh says, but he can’t keep a straight face, and he’s laughing by the time he finishes the question. “What a riot you are. You read everything you can get your damn hands on except, and always except, _those signs_.”

Apparently the man’s name is Newt, and it’s a name that makes Hermann raise his eyebrows and whisper to Mako: “Am I allowed to ask who this man actually is?”

He doesn’t speak quietly enough; the next thing that happens is Newt marching up to him and sticking out his hand, with a manic grin on his face. “Hello, person who is named Hermann and who is obviously Mako’s person. Nice to meet you. I am apparently a person who is named Newt. But that’s okay, I don’t want people to call me by my whole name anyway, and the thing is, the only person who calls me _Doctor_ Geiszler is my mother and everyone else can bite my skinny white ass.”

“Skinny, you’re not skinny. If you jump in Victoria Harbour I guarantee something will try to eat you,” says one of Mako’s companions, the grizzled man with the close-cropped hair. A pair of drumsticks sticks out of one of his pockets.

The man next to him smiles until someone dressed in black taps him on the shoulder and he looks at the others and says, “Ten minutes for sound check, guys, we’d better go - ”

Hermann puts his arms around Mako’s shoulders when she catches him up in another hug, bright and fierce and strong. “I’m so happy you’re here,” she says. “It’ll be just like old times. I’ll sing for you. I haven’t done that in years.”

“And I will be right here, Mako, I will be listening to you,” Hermann says, and he shakes Raleigh’s hand and watches them disappear around a corner.

It makes him smile, though he also feels like he’s intruding on a private moment, when he’s still looking in their direction as Mako drifts toward Raleigh and touches her cheek to his upper arm.

“I wish I weren’t so happy being a cynic.”

Hermann turns around. 

Newt is shuffling on the spot as though he intends to walk a mile without actually moving an inch, and he has his hands in his pockets, and he’s still looking at the passageway that the band has disappeared into. 

“May I ask why?” Hermann says. He thinks he might know what the other man is talking about, but it doesn’t do any harm to seem interested.

“Because then it might mean I can look at Raleigh and Mako and not always be bracing myself for catastrophic failure.” Newt shrugs. “Not that I could actually gain, like, hard evidence of that happening. It was love at first sight for those two and no fuckin’ foolin’, since I was right there. But all I know’s that things always go bad. So I expect them to go so bad because they’ve got it so good.”

He thinks that over for a minute. “You’re the other kind of cynic then. The hopeless one.”

“There are other kinds?” 

“Myself,” Hermann says. “I am cynical about my own chances and I am not cynical about others’. Especially when it comes to Mako. To me, she is hope.”

Newt smiles. Just a small one, a half-sliver of acknowledged truth. “She is at that. And it’s time for her to show that off to this place. Let’s watch her _kill_ Hong Kong.”

*

Hermann takes his seat, and the house lights all go out, to gasps of expectation from the audience. Pinpricks of light all around him as people light up their mobile phones.

Bright blinding flash. Newt is on his feet an arm’s length away, and he has a camera aimed at the crowds around them.

Hermann is still touched and surprised by what Mako’s done for him, because he and Newt are occupying a square of empty space just a few feet away from the hulking stage, close enough that he can almost reach out to touch her when she stands at her mic. Behind them there are crash barriers and then the standing seats, still several feet away.

In short, he’s front row center for his first time watching Into the Drift live, and no one has ever done anything like this for him before, except for Mako herself - Mako and a million acts of kindness, as small as sitting quietly by his side and not fussing, as large as taking him in every time he’d been frustrated by his father or disheartened during the long years of physiotherapy.

“This is awesome,” he vaguely hears Newt say - but anything else that he might want to add to the statement is suddenly drowned out by a long, stirring riff, intricate notes on an electric guitar, and even if Hermann can’t see the crowd going wild behind him he can certainly feel the wash of adrenaline, like being plunged headfirst into a tangible scream that hooks into his nerves and makes him reach into his pocket for a glow stick shaped like a flower. He cracks it open on the end of his cane, and the flower glows bright blue - what else - and he holds it over his head.

A woman’s voice sings: “Here they sang of apocalypse - ”

The crowd roars back: “And here we sang _Not so fast!_ ”

Hermann stares at the stage as it explodes with light and the heart-stopping sound of the drums, as Mako begins to sing “Miracle Mile”, as the crowd surges to its feet and waves fists to the beat, and he’s smiling. He’s rooted to the spot, he’s crushed by all the sensations, the men on the stage pound at their guitars and drums and Mako’s voice is the note that soars above all, that binds all, that powers all.

He sings along, and after a moment he notices that there’s a voice that’s rising with his and he looks at Newt, who is festooned in glow sticks - where had they all come from, Hermann wonders - and who’s singing with his eyes closed.

Into the Drift plays it loud for the first set, eliciting screams when Mako hits the beautiful high note in “Devil’s Depths” and the plain black curtain behind them falls away, revealing the string orchestra backing them up.

Hermann gasps in delight, the sound of it drowned by the raucous audience, but Newt grins and turns to him to flash him a double thumbs-up, and he has to smile and nod in return.

“Here’s a song everyone knows,” Mako says, “and it’s a song I can’t sing by myself.”

Raleigh smiles and puts his guitar down and steps up to the other mic and waves, and they look into each other’s eyes to sing “Never Dial Down”.

Newt is the first in the audience to hoot in appreciation at the end of the song, the violins playing a complicated note of melancholy and hope, and Hermann laughs out loud because even at this distance he can tell that Mako is blushing furiously when Raleigh kisses her.

She smiles and blinks rapidly, and Raleigh saves her by speaking into the mic in her hand: “Okay. We’re going to play something a little bit new, now. We’ve kind of been promising that we’d let you in on a secret during this tour. It’s a song that Mako wrote for a friend of hers, and now that friend is here. We’re not going to be embarrassing this person by putting them in the spotlight but - yes, we’re going to say that we were waiting for that person to show up before we could reveal this one.”

Mako raises her hand, and the arena goes quiet, and she begins to produce a sound that is haunting and delicate and terrifying all at once, unidentifiable vowel tones that soar and soar and catch at Hermann’s heart, till he feels that it’s his breath being taken away from him, till he feels that he must burst -

And then Raleigh and Yancy barge in on the note with a riff that makes Newt scream, “Oh, _fuck!_ ”

On stage, Mako smiles in the middle of sustaining her final notes, and then she tosses her mic high up into the air, snatches at it on the downward movement, and begins to sing: “Hands together! Don’t let go! Hold and hold till the board is crossed! Hang on tight till the war is fought!”

Mako throws the full power of her voice into the song, like waves crashing around and into the walls of the arena, and Hermann collapses gratefully into his seat when she releases them all - when she murmurs, “New single, everyone, out by next week. We call that one ‘Alice and the Rabbit’. 

“And it was written for a friend.”

*

Hermann is drained, the best kind of drained, when the house lights come up for the last time and all he can hear is the weary-happy buzz of the audience filing out into the night.

Three hours have passed, and he’s breathless and dizzy. When he reaches up to his face he’s a little surprised, but not really, to find wet trails snaking down his cheeks. It’s all right. Next to him Newt is blowing his nose, and he sounds raw and shaken and like he’s been shouting all night, which is exactly what he has been doing.

And then Newt says, “I wasn’t expecting you to have such a good voice.”

Hermann smiles and shakes his head a little. He puts his flower-shaped glow stick, its light much dimmed, into one of his pockets. “I thought you were going to comment on me singing in the first place.”

“Hell no. We’ve something in common, you know? We’re tied to this band. This fuckin’ monster of a band,” Newt says as he catches his breath. “We know their songs. Hell, you’ve been listening to Mako sing from the very beginning, and there wasn’t a song they played tonight you weren’t familiar with. Except the surprise song of course. So I know that feeling, man, I know.”

“You were crying,” Hermann says mildly, “when they did the Coldplay medley.”

“Big fan of them, too. ‘Clocks’ is my jam, you know? Especially the hard questions. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I do,” Hermann says.

The silence that settles between them is just as oddly comfortable as when the arena had been filled with voices and song and some really, really epic guitars and drums, and Hermann feels loath to break it with movement, but when he gets to his feet and starts limping towards one of the exits Newt meanders along with him. He loops around Hermann, moving ahead and then circling back. He waits for Hermann to catch up, because the stairs are tricky to navigate - they are shallow and large at the same time.

It’s Newt who speaks, once they’re out in the open air again. Victoria Harbour’s waters are almost placid and almost invisible, easily reflecting the muck of the polluted night sky and the neon of the city lights. “This is such a weird place. It doesn’t really look like a city, you know? It’s islands and buildings and how can we be sure that Hong Kong hasn’t always looked like this?”

“History books,” Hermann says, as dryly as he can.

“Like those things really know anything,” Newt grouses. “Where you gonna go back to, after you’ve left Hong Kong?”

Hermann shifts on his feet and tries to fix the unfamiliar skyline in his mind. “California.”

“Cool,” Newt says. 

“Have you been there?”

“I live there, when I’m not being yanked halfway around the world by crazy friends who happen to be in a band.”

Hermann shakes his head. “It does sound familiar. Come look me up sometime,” he says.

“I will,” Newt says, and it sounds like a promise. “I don’t know anyone else who loves Into the Drift like I do.”

“They don’t know what they’re missing,” Hermann says, and he smiles when that makes Newt laugh.

*

Before he leaves Hong Kong he emails Mako: _Thank you so much. It was a truly wonderful experience. I had a good time. I should come to your concerts more often._

 _We’d be more than happy to have you,_ is the reply. _Did you like your song? I’ll send you a copy as soon as we’ve recorded it properly._

_It was an amazing song. It was brilliant. Thank you._

*

There’s a package waiting on Hermann’s desk when he gets back to work: a long cardboard tube. The handwriting on the label is hopelessly smudged and scratched, but once he manages to make out the words he has to shake his head. He’s not really surprised any more.

_Dear H wasn’t sure how much merch you had and thought you might like this. Email address below, gimme a shout when you get this so I know it didn’t get eaten by the post office._

After he’s done putting up the poster, which shows all four members of Into the Drift in some really sharp-looking suits (and Mako with a pom-pom flower on her head), he begins the return email by writing _Thank you Newt_ , and he thinks about what that really means. It had been nice to share the experience of going to a concert with him. It had been nice to stand next to him in an unfamiliar city. 

He wants to talk to Newt in more familiar places.

So he adds, _If you should be in the area, I’d like to invite you to coffee._

The answer arrives nearly instantaneously: _I’ll be there._

**Author's Note:**

> Language notes:
> 
> [1] - _O-hisashiburi_ \- in Japanese, "Long time no see/hear."
> 
> [2] - _mata de ne_ \- in Japanese, "Till next time!"


End file.
